


arms extended

by owlinaminor



Series: author's favorites [2]
Category: Bandstand - Oberacker/Oberacker & Taylor
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 03:33:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12123633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlinaminor/pseuds/owlinaminor
Summary: a remix of “welcome home (finale)”(or: the moments that inspired the lines of julia's poem)





	arms extended

**Author's Note:**

> happy trails, bandstand!!!! this musical is so goddamned meaningful; the story it tells and the means it uses to tell that story deserve to be shared with the entire world. even after stage-dooring several times i've been unable to find the words to tell the cast of this show how much it means to me, so i'm instead trying to do that through fic. (i gave each of the main cast members a copy of this fic after the final show today. whether they read it or not is their choice, but it's there!! in their back pockets!!! wow!!!!)
> 
> anyway - enough of me being sappy, let's get to the fic.

 

_Johnny made it home, most of him at least –_

 

It is seven o’clock on a Tuesday when Johnny calls her.

“Julia,” he says.  And there’s an edge to his voice that reminds her of a hidden bayonet, quiet as it is sharp.  “Can you come over?”

“Of course,” she replies, careful to keep her consonants light, as though this is a conversation they have every day.  “38th and Longwood, right?”

She finds him curled on the floor of his kitchen, a toolbox sitting on the floor next to him.  There’s a pack of lightbulbs by the refrigerator, and an old rubber mallet by the edge of the stove, its head pointed out towards the doorway as though calling out an alarm.  It’s strange how small Johnny seems – he looms larger than life behind his drum set, engineering the rhythm of the whole band, but in his kitchen now Julia can see how his clothes hang loose on his body, as though he is half shadow, or half ghost.

“The overhead light went out,” he explains.  His voice has that same edge she noticed on the phone, but it’s sharper now, more keening.  “I was trying to fix it.  But my back – something went wrong.”

“What do you need me to do?” Julia asks.

Johnny breathes in, and she watches how he holds it inside his chest, shaky, fluttering, like a baby bird.

“Help me up,” he says.  “Drive me to the gig tonight.  Please.”

“Where’s your medicine?” Julia counters.  “Shouldn’t you take –”

He shakes his head before she can finish the question.  “Not before the gig.  Slows me down.”

Julia watches him, waits for a break in his conviction, a sign that she should call Donny and say they’ll be one man down – but none comes.  Johnny only sits very still, breathes in, does not look at her.

“Okay,” she says.

She offers him her arm, and he takes it, he stands slowly.  He is heavier than she expected.

“Don’t tell the guys about this,” Johnny says, the edge in his voice slipping towards her chest.

“Okay,” Julia says again.

 

_Nick learned to survive, means you never trust –_

 

“Why do you feel the need to be so abrasive all the time?”

Nick turns to Julia.  Oliver’s dining area is dimly lit, all soft golds and encroaching shadows, but she can see his sneer plain as day.  (Or perhaps she can see it because she always pictures him with that expression, like a shoulder devil in a cartoon or a villain in an overdramatic spy movie.)

“That kid clearly admired you,” Julia goes on, undeterred.  “She wanted honest advice on how to be a better trumpet player.  Why couldn’t you give it to her?”

“Why _should_ I have given it to her?” Nick replies.  He lifts his beer and takes a long drink, throat moving up and down as he swallows.

“It wouldn’t cost you anything to be nice, once in a while,” Julia says.  Her voice is raising – she can feel the embers igniting but does nothing to quell them, this bar is mostly empty and she’s half-convinced Nick hates her already.

Nick’s sneer drops, now.  Oliver’s is dimly lit, but Julia can see his knuckles grow white around his beer, his eyes dark enough to contain an army’s worth of shadows.

“Do you know what I hate about teaching?” he asks.

Donny told her once that Nick spent time in a POW camp, somewhere in Italy.  He doesn’t talk about it – _of course he doesn’t, none of them talk about anything –_ but once she learned, she began to notice so much.  How he always scans a new club they’re playing at, checking for exits and planning emergency escape routes.  How he always stands at the back of the group, eyes ranging over a space as though searching for hidden shadows.  How he always finishes all of the food they order when the band gets dinner after a gig, even when it’s oily, lukewarm pizza or fries that taste like cardboard.

Nick is sharper than the rest of them, somehow.  He plays louder, plays higher, as though covering for something he thinks is missing.  Julia wonders what he was like before the war – if, had they met then, they would have been friends.

“What do you hate about teaching?” she echoes.

“That the kids all trust me,” Nick replies.

Julia doesn’t say anything for a long moment.  She runs an index finger over her water glass, rubbing away beads of condensation.

And then, she says, “Maybe you should trust yourself a little more.”

Nick laughs at that – too loud and too harsh, like a crackle of cannon fire – but his gaze is softer, when he looks at her.  The lights in Oliver’s grow warmer around them.

 

_Davy cracks a joke, claims to be alright –_

 

Julia has never seen Davy this drunk before.

She’s seen him drunk, of course – she thinks sometimes that Davy exists only in varying degrees of drunk, a fish that gets his oxygen from the air bubbles in beer and the burn in whiskey – but never quite like this.  He can barely walk home, propped up between Nick and Donny as though they’re twin crutches just shy of cracking.

“Someone should stay with him,” Nick says when they reach his door, in a flat tone of voice that means it won’t be him.  “Make sure he doesn’t suffocate on his own puke.”

“I can –” Donny starts to say.

But Julia puts a hand on his shoulder – there are still three songs to arrange before their Friday gig, and he’s picking up a double shift tomorrow.

“I’ll do it,” she tells them.  She clicks her heels up Davy’s front steps before there can be any protest.  And she lines them up evenly, parallel to the angle of his couch, before she sits back and pulls her tiny red notebook out of her purse.  There’s an old grandfather clock leaning against Davy’s wall, right between the radio and the tacked-up calendar with all the Donny Nova Band’s gigs scrawled in red.  Its long pendulum reminds Julia of the staff of Davy’s bass, stalwart and carefully polished, and its ticking hands helps her keep time.

She checks on him every twenty minutes.  Ensures that he’s lying on his side and snoring soundly.  Until around four o’clock, when he pads into the kitchen and startles at the lamp she coaxed into light.

“What’re you –” he starts to ask.

Julia stands and smiles at him.  Her bare feet pad silently on the off-white carpet.

“Sit down,” she tells him.  “I’ll make coffee.”

He watches as she locates his coffee and his filters, measures six tablespoons for a full pot, sets the machine to whirring.  And then she sits down across the table from him, in a chair several inches taller than his.  (Funny, how someone can afford drinks at the Rio every other night but not own a matching set of kitchen chairs.)

“What did you see in those camps?” Julia asks.

Davy smooths his hair back – all the gel is long gone, and it’s sticking up in several distinct directions like an unusually fluffy porcupine.

“You don’t want to know,” he says.

She shakes her head.  “Yes, I do.”

 

_Wayne is never free, schedules out his day –_

 

Crossing the park, she sees Wayne.

It’s strange, to see him not attached to his trombone case, as though he isn’t quite himself without it.  (Even when they can convince him to stay for drinks or dinner, he keeps it right at his feet, like a loyal guard dog.)  And he’s wearing a hat – a wool, knit thing, dark blue with a thin red and white stripe around the middle.

Julia approaches him, intending to say hi, but then stops halfway down the path when she realizes he isn’t alone.  He’s standing next to a swing set, a rusty combination of once-silver pipes and chains that she’s always pleasantly surprised to discover hasn’t fallen down yet when she passes through.  A girl with curly blonde hair cascading around her shoulders and a purple felt coat hanging open is pushing a tiny boy all in red on the right-most swing.  The boy is shrieking and the girl laughing as she pushes him higher and higher, as though trying to launch him into the sun.

“Don’t – please – slow down,” Wayne is saying.  His voice sounds tightly wound, the same way it does when he points out an error in Donny’s voicing or asks Davy to please, _please_ stop touching his mutes.  “You need to push with an even rhythm – I can time you, or count out beats – it’s too dangerous like this – he could fall – Emily, _please_ – ”

Julia watches as the two kids – Emily and Grady, they must be – continue to play with complete disregard for their father’s directions.  She keeps watching as a woman with carefully curled hair approaches from the other side of the playground, exchanges a few words with Wayne, then shouts something at the kids.  As Wayne crouches down and reaches out his arms, and first Emily, then Grady, embrace him stiffly and quickly, as though he is a distant relative whose name they don’t remember.  As the woman leads the children away, leaving Wayne to stare at the swing set – the right-most swing is still swaying back and forth, like an echo of a long note lingering in an empty hall.

And now, Julia does walk up to Wayne, careful to come in from his right and stay outside a one-foot radius.

“How much did you see?” he asks her.

“How long have you been living at a hotel?” Julia asks in return.

“Two weeks.”  Wayne turns to Julia – his eyes are very blue and very clear, but there are such dark circles underneath.  “Don’t tell the guys, please.”

“I won’t,” Julia promises.

And she stands with him for seven more minutes (Wayne times it) as the right-most swing sways, sways, sways, and finally comes to a stop.

 

_Jimmy made it back to town four months ago –_

 

She approaches Jimmy after rehearsal one day, two weeks before they’re due to leave for New York.

“Donny told me something,” she says.

“You guys tell each other everything, huh,” Jimmy replies.  His voice is light, casual, but she sees the way his fingers tighten around the bell of his clarinet, the way his knuckles go white as he twists the instrument apart.

“Yeah.”  Julia puts her hand on Jimmy’s shoulder, tries to hide her frown when he shrugs it off.  “And I just wanted to say – if you ever want to talk about anything, I’m your gal.”

Jimmy finishes pulling apart his clarinet: upper joint, lower joint, barrel.  He pulls a cloth through each piece, wipes the keys, taking care that it shines faintly in the fluorescent lights of Donny’s apartment.  Then, he closes his case and turns to look at Julia, meeting her gaze for the first time in this conversation.

There’s something fragile in his eyes, like a blue sky thinking only of the next thunderstorm.  But still, he asks:

“Want to go get dinner before the gig tomorrow?”

She nods, smiling.  “As long as it’s not at that one Italian place.”

And so they get dinner – and he doesn’t tell her about his ship, or his friends, or the reasons why he’s so bent on justice, these days.  But he does tell her about his classes at the law school, about when a professor called on him while he was inventing new solos on the side of his notebook and he said the answer to a question of tax codes was “F-sharp minor” and about when one of his classmates pulled an entire lemon out of his bag before a lecture, asked the time, then returned it to his bag with no explanation.  He tells her about the strangest case studies he’s come across, and the firm he’s hoping to intern at once he graduates, and the Agatha Christie novels he’s reading in his unbelievably tiny windows of free time.

Julia laughs more during that two-hour-long dinner than she has in the past month.  And Jimmy’s grinning when they leave for the gig, and she might be imagining it, but she thinks his footsteps are a little lighter – as though he’s raising his knees higher when he walks.

 

_Donny does his best, trying to pretend –_

 

Donny is standing before her, crying.

It strikes Julia, clear as a church bell on Sunday morning, that she has never seen a man cry before.  Not even in the pictures.  Not even Michael, on the day of their wedding.  It’s loud, and choked – Donny’s sobs echoing in the twilit streets – and so uncomfortable.

But nothing about Donny has ever been quite comfortable.  He speaks like he’s always shouting, always angry about something, fitting twenty words into the space of ten and pulling Julia into a world she thought she’d left.  He tells her she goes to too many movies – and it’s funny, she’s stopped going as much since she joined the band, but she still feels as though she’s watching movies when she talks to him – if movies had weight, and substance, and hands she could reach out and hold, and voices that could reach out of the screen and cut her open.

She’s cut open, right now.  She’s bleeding on the pavement.  Or he is.  Or both of them are, and it’s impossible to tell whose blood is whose in the twilight.  It’s that moment when she got the telegram all over again, only Donny is somehow both the soldier who delivered the news and the woman crumpled on the ground and she’s left watching ghostlike  from above.

“Go home,” she tells him.   _Go home._

She relives this moment endlessly – walking home in the dark, and collapsing into her pillow, and recounting the story to her mother, and climbing to the roof of her house to compose the first poem she’s ever meant for eyes other than hers, and standing in the middle of a New York City stage preparing to slap America in the face.  She should have reached out to him, she thinks.  Should have pressed their broken hearts up against each other and prayed for them to heal.

But she doesn’t reach out to him then – and so she builds herself another chance.  And perhaps it is healthier this way.  Perhaps she needed to be cut open once or twice, to sing for the boys who will be cut open every day for the rest of their lives.

 

_And I stand here helpless, my arms extended –_

 

There are seven spotlights on the stage.

Six spotlights for six men, and one for Julia.  Seven spotlights – seven windows, to what was supposed to be a tribute to the troops and transformed into a tribute to something more personal, and more true.

Julia is transposing in her head.  She told Donny she remembered the words – and she _does,_ but those are no longer quite the right words, or no longer quite the right intonation.  She sees all of her boys on stage in their shiny tuxedos, and for a moment she sees them in military uniforms – steeling themselves to be cut open.

 _Faster,_ Donny says.  This is how a ballad becomes a battle cry.

She reaches out her arms, as though if she extends far enough she could embrace them all – could take her spotlight and Donny’s spotlight and Jimmy’s and Davy’s and Wayne’s and Nick’s and Johnny’s and forge them into a wide shield of light encompassing all the people of America – as though Julia could become every man and woman who left pieces of themselves behind, just for a moment, just to give them strength enough to keep fighting.

Their war’s not ended, and neither has hers.

 

_Welcome home, my boys –_

 

The lights go down, the curtain falls, and six shadows rise in its place.

For five minutes, the members of the Donny Nova Band were something more than men.  They were something like pieces of cracked glass, set up on stage for the light to shine through – something like slits of mirror placed in the center of a packed auditorium so that each member of the audience could see themselves – something like exposed souls.

But now the curtain has fallen, and they are men again.  Davy wipes the sweat from his face, Johnny reaches in his pocket for his bottle of pills, Wayne picks his mute back up from the stage.  Donny steps away from Julia and turns his head, as though she wouldn’t be able to see him swipe at his eyes with his sleeve.

It’s so cold, on this stage.  There are goosebumps running along Julia’s arms.

They’re pushed off to some out of the way dressing room, and lectured, and handed back their release forms – it all happens in a blur, like an old movie with static around the edges – and then they’re standing on the street corner outside the theater, and cars are racing past and people are shouting several blocks over but Julia has never felt a more expansive quiet.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

They all turn to look at her – six men, six shadows, six pieces of her heart.

“What for?” Wayne asks.

“For not telling you the lyrics – for not giving you some warning – for not, I don’t know –”

Her voice is teetering on the edge of a cliff.  But before it can break, she feels something solid: Davy’s got his arm around her shoulders.  He’s shaking, but he’s steady.

“You’ve got nothing to apologize for,” he tells her.

And then Johnny is embracing her, and Jimmy is leaning in from her right, and Donny is tucking his head in her shoulder, and Nick’s reaching an arm around her waist, and they all shout at Wayne until he lets himself be pulled in, too – and they stand on the sidewalk of Manhattan, seven pieces of broken glass or one cobbled-together band – and Julia is expanding expanding expanding –

She might not be able to embrace every grieving soul in America, but she can embrace these six.  She has words and heart enough.

 

_Welcome home._

**Author's Note:**

> cry with me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor) & [tumblr](http://owlinaminor.tumblr.com/)


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